Having participated in the 20th Annual Manhattan Short Film Festival, I wanted to shine a light on the ten finalists. I’ll break this review into two parts, covering the first block of films before the festival’s intermission and then the second block of films after the intermission.

What the film festival does, is it takes thousands of short films from all over the world, narrows it down to ten finalists and then lets the audience from all the participating venues vote on the winner for best film and best actor. Currently, there are more than 250 venues from six continents that participate.

Do No Harm had an interesting premise and ultimately, it is about what a woman is willing to do if her daughter’s life is in danger.

The premise sees a female surgeon in Hong Kong working on her patient when a group of thugs barge in with their sights on that very same patient. They take out the rest of the medical staff, leaving just the surgeon. She refuses to step aside because of her oath to her patient. Her oath and her morals are tested and all the while, she shows that she is pretty much a martial arts badass.

The film is very confined and takes place in one room, and then a hallway, at the very end. But the tight space adds a little something to the narrative.

This is a brutal and violent short film.

In the end, it is a bit one-dimensional but it peaked my interest for the 11 minutes it ran.

Behind was my favorite film of the first block of shorts in this festival. I went into it blindly, as I did with all of these pictures.

This was the only horror film of the bunch and that was kind of exciting because I expected these films to mostly be short character studies.

Most modern horror is pretty crappy but there does seem to be a small resurgence in quality over the last few years. While I don’t think this could work, stretched out over a 90 minutes picture, it really made the most of its 15 minutes.

The film builds suspense like nothing I’ve seen in a long while. And then the big horrific payoff is incredibly satisfying and I was legitimately frightened by it. It’s best not to know much more and to just experience it, as I did.

This was the only US film out of the ten finalists, so I was hoping that it would be pretty good. It wasn’t.

It also wasn’t bad, it just didn’t do anything for me.

It’s a comedy and it focuses on a guy who tries to woo his high school crush, a girl that never gave him the time of day because she’s a gold digger. Being forgotten in a rich guy’s mansion, where he was fixing the plumbing, he calls the girl and invites her over.

It was lighthearted and a bit funny but there wasn’t much of anything that made it standout. Americans are obsessed with status and money, yada, yada, yada.

The actors were decent enough and the main guy was amusing but this film is pretty forgettable.

Hope Dies Last was the shortest picture of the first block of films. It also just falls short of Behind, as my favorite of this bunch. It makes the best use of its time, at just 8 minutes.

Emotionally, this film has the most impact. It is also based on a real person.

The picture showcases a haircut. But as the film rolls on, you realize that something is wrong and that for some reason the barber is terrified of his client. It is revealed that he is a Polish prisoner at Auschwitz and that the man getting his haircut is a Nazi officer. The barber was forced to cut the hair of this man, weekly. With each cut, he was terrified that it would be his last.

There is no dialogue but the attention to detail and the cinematography really work in providing the context for the narrative. Everything is revealed at the end but the suspense is built up well and you want to understand what is happening.

Tarek Slater was impressive as the barber and with the emotions he was able to convey without dialogue.

Somehow this has won over 30 awards, or so the poster and the website for this short film claim. Truthfully, it was my least favorite film of the entire festival. In fact, I had a hard time believing that this could even be a finalist.

It is a comedy story but it is derivative, in the worst way and something I’ve seen countless times as dream sequences is just about every sitcom that has run a long time and ran out of fresh ideas.

The story follows a guy who has a “perfect day” only for it to be a dream and then to relive the same day and have everything go wrong. Truthfully, so many other people have made this story and done a much better job with it.

There wasn’t really anything to learn here, the egotistical director puts himself in the film, as himself, and none of it works.

At least it is a Spanish film with a lot of Spanish hotties in it, though. That’s about all I can really get behind.